Hammerspace Inc. is revolutionizing data storage by doing the formerly impossible: unifying data through a parallel NFS, or network file system, architecture. The technology has a lot of potential in the enterprise space, especially when it comes to generative artificial intelligence, according to David Flynn (pictured), chief executive officer of Hammerspace.

David Flynn of Hammerspace talks about the advantages of data orchestration.

“You should be able to have your data at the highest velocities from whichever data center and have it be the same data, even as it moves across systems, across sites and through time, it’s got to be always in the same logical place,” Flynn said. “The same way when you switch your iPhone, you can find everything where you last left it … that same thing has to happen now with the enterprise exabyte scale data to where it’s simply omnipresent and preserved through time.” 

Flynn spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier for the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards 2025 interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why unifying data has been so difficult and the benefits of Hammerspace’s platform.

Fighting the ghosts of parallel NFS’ past

Hammerspace’s platform solves two long-standing problems in the industry: Bringing a parallel network file system architecture into the world of enterprise-standard network-attached storage and data gravity. The first attempt at incorporating parallel NFS into NAS collapsed, which has made other companies leery of trying it again, according to Flynn. However, by building the architecture into Linux, Hammerspace has succeeded where others failed.

“Because we fix that parallel NFS and make the standard stuff work and what’s built into Linux, what that means is that you don’t have to have any custom software, not just on the client, but not even on the storage server,” he explained. “It can all just be virgin Linux, and Hammerspace sits as a control plane separate on the side, and that’s what makes it so foundationally different is that we can aggregate storage systems en masse.”

Having what Flynn calls hyperscale NAS also helps with the other issue, data gravity, by separating the metadata from the data. Hammerspace’s orchestration platform keeps the data logically unified even when it is distributed physically. Based on its forward-thinking orchestration system, the company received a CUBEd award for “Top Data Storage Innovation.”

“It’s like separating the what from where, and now even though the where changes, the what stays the same,” he said. “Not moving data costs you more money. Data gravity, that’s the biggest thing because it’s what keeps you vendor-locked. It compromises the productivity of your teams [and] it keeps your [graphics processing units] from having the data that they need. Having data be stuck in storage is the cardinal sin.”

The cost-saving element is key, according to Flynn. Hammerspace’s platform, which is already being used in Meta Platform Inc.’s AI infrastructure, will save companies valuable time and resources. Since GPUs are costly, getting every ounce of use out of them is critical.

“The main motivator is increased productivity of people and systems, and nowadays GPUs [are] so hard to come by [and] so expensive,” he said. “I think [Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp.] said that’s his cardinal sin … a GPU sitting idle. That comes back to my sin of having data stuck in storage because it’s not delivered to the GPU where it’s not idle.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage for the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards 2025 interview series:

Photo: SiliconANGLE